Need input for weird stats

[dareutwo]

Morning all -
Checking stats from yesterday and it appears that some sort of bot (not google) went through marks.
It appears it followed every link, but I cannot find Anything in stats for this.
My other domains simply see it as a marks referrer.

Anyone have any ideas or see the same thing?
No biggie but it threw the raw/unique stats right out the window.
And if you're a sponsor, hey, it wasn't my bot. Mine doesn't follow sponsor links.

[raymor]

When you ask people to explain something that you're
seeing, like some stats, _SHOW_ them what you're talking about.
Let us see what the heck you mean. Particularly in your case,
because your question makes no sense as is and seeing what
you're talkining about could have explained it.
You said that when looking through your stats you saw a bot,
but you didn't see anything in stats. WTF?

[PR_Tom]

dare, I've seen that activity too from time to time..

I'll see hits to all the sponsors linked from particular domains as if a bot crawled and followed all of the sponsor links. I've never identified it, but it sure makes sponsor stats look whacky for the day..

I've never had a sponsor complain or anything which is good.

[dareutwo]

raymor -
I'll try to explain this, but I can't show you anything, because I don't know what I'm looking for.

Sponsor A partner stats for yesterday (of which I have sprinkled throughout) ... 96 raw, 4 uniques. The uniques have been 4-10 per day for months and months.
Sponsor B stats 207 raw, 7 uniques.
etc....

What I'm asking is What else could cause this besides a bot?
If a bot?
Who's, and how to verify?

[raymor]

Oh, I see. You saw this activity in your sponsor stats
but didn't get any further info from there or your local stats?

When you said you saw this in your stats and it followed all
the links I was thinking that you were looking at Webalizer,
as you didn't say that you were looking at sponsor stats or that
it followed sponsor links. There are a lot of spiders out there,
all of the other search engines other than Google, for example.
Another example would be our password site spider that
runs every night finding new passwords sites and checking
old ones to notify webmasters that their passwords are listed.
If you had a password site linking to you we might have hit
you last night ourselves.

I'm not familiar with your site and business model, but I do
see that it's a link site of some sort. If you do or ever did either
qualify or rank your recip links or posted links by traffic in or
out somebody may have been using a spider to try to cheat.
To cheat your traffic in counter they'd send fake hits from their
site and then "click" your outgoing links with the same bogus info
in case you had a simple cheat detection script that ensured that
all visitors who come also click on another page or leave.
To cheat a traffic out system they have their spider click every
link but there's so that they get rotated up in the listing to get
their "fair share" of outgoing traffic. Even if your site doesn't
use any such qualifying or ranking system don't discount this
possibility as cheaters and crackers are often extremely stupid
and try some BS on you that is totally inapplicable to your site.

[dareutwo]

Raymor - Thanks!
No, don't have a password site,traffic script or any of that.
Ok, just move on then I guess... LOL